When the people who you'd expect to give a shit don't
The bar for not engaging with media that directly supports genocide is in hell, apparently
Photos unrelated, thought we could use some pretty. Here's Monday's sunset.
I don't have a greater throughline here or moral but I kinda needed to just put some thoughts down. This week, worker-owned gaming news site Aftermath showed their ass multiple times and it's got me thinking about how easy it should be to do the right thing, and yet.
And yet.
First, they wrote a piece about the new Microsoft Forza game despite the ongoing BDS boycott over Microsoft's active participation in Palestinian genocide, and second, they published a piece praising the game Librarian which has "we used AI when making this" disclosures on Steam1.
Both are bad on their own, but both articles include bizarre telling-on-themselves instances; the Forza piece DIRECTLY links to their own site's Games Media Can't Ignore BDS Xbox Boycott article and then continues talking about the game like it wasn't a consideration, and the Librarian piece states that the AI use disclaimer gave the author 'pause'... before deciding to write about it anyway. I get that I'm a hardliner on AI use but acknowledging that you thought maybe you shouldn't write about it because of that disclosure and then did anyway is wild.
In almost any other context, a gaming news site doing shit like this is par for the course so why does anyone care that Aftermath did it?
As a worker-owned site that's supposedly left-leaning and not beholden to sponsors or parent companies (or as they even say in their own justification, review codes or publisher approval) it feels out of fucking nowhere. Maybe I'm holding the site to a higher standard because it's not a Waypoint (RIP) that had to try to write insightful criticism about race and inequality under the confines of an oppressive parent company; it's not an IGN that has to cater to Capital G Gamers - here, from their own site in their own words:
We need a curious, independent press to hold power to account, to cut through the marketing hype, and to elevate the voices of those affected by the gaming industry’s upheaval.
Again, photo unrelated. My partner and I years ago started photographing the walls at the pharmacy every time we were in the drive-thru and we keep it going to this day
It gets disheartening after a while, man!
The people you'd expect to give a shit are still promoting Microsoft titles despite the numerous calls in favor of the boycott, or they are still playing and promoting the Harry Potter game (despite the continued financial success of that IP directly funding the pockets of someone using said money to devastate trans rights - get the fuck out of here with this death of the author justification) or they are still making allowances for works that use the plagiarism technology that's directly leading to job losses in the industry, all other ethical and environmental concerns not even factored in - so what do you even say?
Hey, the moon will always be there
Again, I get that I'm an outlier in that when I find something abhorrent or damaging I cut it out cold turkey and not everyone can live like that, but specifically a worker-owned site focused on labor and the problems in this industry hand waiving this shit just feels like we've lost the plot.
Oh well. Still looking forward to playing Young Suns once it's available outside of the Microsoft ecosystem.
The disclosure is really weird; they say they used AI in the 'refinement' of some of the graphical assets (but claim they created them by hand), used AI for grammatical corrections in text (which is either them considering spell check generative AI or something else is going on lmfao) and then have a bit about 'human craftsmanship with AI as a support tool' which like, no thanks. Again, I get that I'm a hard-liner on this shit but the point is the author of the article said this was enough to hold him off the game...until it wasn't.↩